User:AndyMabbett

/scratchpad

At least if I put something here, I won't keep seeing my name as a red link...

Me

Andy Mabbett, from Birmingham, England. I blog at http://pigsonthewing.wordpress.com/

My background

Having programmed machines with paper tape and punched cards (at a very young age!), I'm glad to see things have moved on a little. I gave up programming many years ago, but have been involved in the design and management of pioneering, large-scale websites in the UK's public sector since 1994.

I am a published author and journalist - but (as anyone who's corrected my 'tyops' will tell you) I can't type.

I am a trustee, and webmaster, of the West Midland Bird Club.

Web for all

I believe strongly in adherence to web standards, making web pages as accessible as possible, to everyone, and that it's important to communicate using the simplest language necessary, to convey ideas clearly. Hence my proposal for a brief description of microformats.

My microformats interests

I am the proponent of:

• luna
• mars
  • combined in geo-extension-strawman
• species

and have reactivated the previously-proposed:

• currency

Other pages I have created include:

• criticism
• firefox-extensions
• hcalendar-intro
• mediawiki-mark-up-issues
• rfc-2119
  • the various rfc-2119#Templates
• iso-8601
• lots of redirects, cheatsheets, templates and splitting of over-long pages

and (at the time of writing) I'm responsible for most of:

• advocacy

See also: my contributions

I have published microformats on:

• This wiki!
• West Midland Bird Club including:
  • Footers of all pages, as they are updated (hCard with logo, using include-pattern
  • Contact Details et seq (hCard)
  • Diary events pages et seq (hCalendar)
  • What's New (hAtom)
  • Home Page ([tags)
• Wikipedia - hCalendar, hCard, geo and adr: see Wikipedia's microformats project
• Wikitravel - hCard, geo and adr: see Wikitravel's microformats page
• Wikispecies - pilot use of species: see Wikispecies' microformats page

and am responsible for their use on many other web sites, as listed on our advocacy pages.

Browsing

I usually surf with whatever is the latest formal release of FireFox, using far too many extensions (including Operator for parsing microformats), under Windows XP, on a 20" or 2x17" monitor at 1280x1024 resolution.

I use FireFox's live bookmarks and the Sage extension, to view hAtom feeds.

Censorship

I object strongly to the removal of this answer, from the FAQ:

Q. How will microformat class names impact page size?

A2. Possibly quite considerably, especially if your original data doesn't make use of, or only has few, class names.

For example:

<tr class="X">
<th scope="row">Friday 3<br>
7:30–9:30pm</th>
<td><abbr class="wmbc" title="West Midland Bird Club">WMBC</abbr> <a href="../solihull/indoor.htm" title="Solihull Branch indoor meetings">Solihull Branch indoor meeting</a>.</td>
<td>Solihull College, New Lecture Rooms, Blossomfield Road, Solihull B91 1SB (SP142790).</td>
<td>Steve Smith: The Farne Islands and the Bass Rock.</td>
</tr>

vs:

<tr id="D20061103a" class="vevent X">
<th scope="row">Friday 3<br>
<abbr class="dtstart" title="2006-11-03T19:30:00+00:00">7:30</abbr>–<abbr class="dtend" title="2006-11-03T21:30:00+00:00">9:30</abbr>pm</th>
<td class="summary"><abbr class="wmbc" title="West Midland Bird Club">WMBC</abbr> <a class="url" href="../solihull/indoor.htm" title="Solihull Branch indoor meetings">Solihull Branch indoor meeting</a>.</td>
<td class="location vCard"><span class="fn org">Solihull College</span>, <span class="adr"><span class="extended-address">New Lecture Rooms</span>, <span class="street-address">Blossomfield Road</span>, <span class="locality">Solihull</span> <span class="postal-code">B91 1SB</span></span> (<abbr class="geo" title="52.4095; -1.7921">SP142790</abbr> >).</td>
<td class="description">Steve Smith: The Farne Islands and the Bass Rock.</td>
</tr>

That's 399 characters increased to 860; over double.

Non-food recipes

"other musings are purely theoretical [...] recipes means only food recipes"

• Google finds hits for "weedkiller recipe"; "paint recipe" (about 22,800); whitewash recipe; "glue recipe" (about 9,910 ); "play dough recipe" (about 10,300); "concrete recipe"; "gunpowder recipe" and "plaster recipe" - and again for all those in the format "recipe for..."; e.g. recipe for concrete (about 11,000). Andy Mabbett 09:41, 15 Mar 2007 (PDT)

Copyright

Released into public domain

I agree to release my text and image contributions, unless otherwise stated, into the public domain. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use pages with my contributions under public domain terms, please check the other contributors' user pages.

Overall

...I'd rather be out bird-watching.